Concerts

Friday, 18 August, 2017 at 8:00 pm

Palestrina: Song of Songs

Stile Antico opens the Laus Polyphoniae festival with an extensive selection from Palestrina’s five-part Canticum canticorum, a musical setting of the Song of Songs, the magnificent love poem from the Old Testament in which the love between a man and a woman symbolises the love between God and the believer. There is no other work in which Palestrina achieved such a consummate portrayal of passion. He said himself that this was something new, perhaps not suitable for singing in church, although the work consists of 29 sacred motets.